Hard new looks at the tech ecosystem and its entrepreneurial future

ENAR

Before the October 2019 uprising, it was not difficult to list unresolved questions and some outright disappointments with the way that the Lebanese entrepreneurship ecosystem had been shaped in the past six years since Lebanon’s central bank, Banque du Liban (BDL), effectively launched it with publication of its Circular 331. In mid-November, amid the uprising, the Executive roundtable on entrepreneurship (the second in a series of six) witnessed most of the same systemic and operational concerns as had been debated in the ecosystem before, but with two added accents: the money will never be the same, and the discussion has gained honesty and clarity. In other words, the financial wells to nurture the knowledge economy and the few Lebanese startups with real economic promise need to be re-drilled elsewhere and meet new specifications. And everyone in entrepreneurship acceleration is beyond wasting their time on idle ecosystem diplomacy or polite compliments